Quite a nice day out there. May go for a walk in the country 
Happy invoicing!
- Who Can Stop These Adorable Pigs? - "Voracious. Destructive. Radioactive. Wild boars take over." Apparently wild boar are becoming a major pest in many parts of the world, and it's not easy to do anything to control them. (The radioactive ones come from the area around Chernobyl.)
- A Computer of a Certain Age - "The first computer I ever owned was a Macintosh Performa 630CD. My dad bought it for me in 1994, and I used it for around five years. It was one of the last 68k Macs and had a 33 Mhz processor, 8 MB of ram, and a 250 MB hard drive... a few weeks ago when I was back home visiting, I stumbled upon it and became curious. Would this old thing still start up? If it did work, could one use it for anything useful? Could you get it on the internet? I packed it into a box and took it back home with me to find some answers." Linus Edwards goes online with a computer as old as Netscape
- Update on current occult activities - "Occultists are increasingly defiling the land by laying cursed objects along the roadsides throughout Britain in enormous quantities." Plastic bags in trees? Curses. Hubcaps at the roadside? Curses. In fact, just about all the crap that litters our highways and byways? Curses, the lot of it
- Here is Today - Neat animated visualisation of human timescales in the larger scheme of things. Doesn't work on IE7 or IE8;
I'll try IE9 as soon as the VM has finished downloadingjust checked, and it works on IE9. Incidentally, Microsoft now offer free VMs for download, to let you test stuff on all the different versions of IE: http://www.modern.ie/en-us/virtualization-tools
- Fast Database Emerges from MIT Class, GPUs and Student’s Invention - "Todd Mostak’s first tangle with big data didn’t go well. As a master’s student at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at Harvard in 2012, he was mapping tweets for his thesis project on Egyptian politics during the Arab Spring uprising. It was taking hours or even days to process the 40 million tweets he was analyzing... While taking a class on databases at MIT, Mostak built a new parallel database, called MapD, that allows him to crunch complex spatial and GIS data in milliseconds, using off-the-shelf gaming graphical processing units (GPU) like a rack of mini supercomputers... 'The speed ups over PostGIS … I’m not an expert, and I’m sure I could have been more efficient in setting up the system in the first place, but it was 700,000 times faster,' Mostak said. 'Something that would take 40 days was done in less than a second.'" This awesome tool will be open sourced once he's tidied up his code, but for now you can have a play with TweetMap "which allows users to look at Twitter heat maps from 125 million tweets sent in three week span in December of 2012."
- Cloned at Birth: The Story of Ridiculous Fishing - "The interview is over. The story, told in pieces at least a hundred times in bars, at hamburger joints, on stages and in private circles of up-and-coming game developers, has now been told for the first time in its entirety. It is a story about the little guy getting bullied and making a stand. And winning. It is the story of Ridiculous Fishing, and how two men from the Netherlands rallied the worldwide community of independent game developers to take on the practice of game cloning and reclaim their invention to launch what will become (for a time) the best-reviewed iOS game of 2013." A good look at the trials and tribulations faced by indie game devs.
- Diary of the Hitler Diary Hoax - "On April 25, 1983, Stern magazine—the German answer to Life—held a press conference to make a sensational announcement: their star reporter had discovered a trove of Hitler’s personal diaries, lost since a plane crash in 1945. Now Stern would begin publishing what he’d found... Two weeks later, the diaries were exposed as fakes—and not particularly good ones, written at great speed by Konrad Kujau, a small-time crook and prolific forger." A detailed account of how the hoax played out, based on the recollections of Felix Schmidt, the only surviving Stern editor involved.
- The world that only formerly-blind people can see - "They once were blind but now they see. Which begs the question — what exactly do people see when they gain sight for the first time? Often, it's terrifying." Actually it raises the question, not begs it; but it's an interesting article despite that grating error in the subhead.
- Found at Auction: The Unseen Photographs of a Legend that Never Was - "Picture this: quite possibly the most important street photographer of the 20th century was a 1950s children’s nanny who kept herself to herself and never showed a single one of her photographs to anyone. Decades later in 2007, a Chicago real estate agent and historical hobbyist, John Maloof purchased a box of never-seen, never-developed film negatives of an unknown ‘amateur’ photographer for $380 at his local auction house." The story of unknown photographer Vivian Maier, who is now to be the subject of a documentary film.
- Mercator Puzzle - A neat little puzzle from the Google Maps team: drag the countries in red around the map, and they are distorted by the Mercator projection. Work out where they actually fit and drop them in the right place to turn them green. Hours of fun
Happy invoicing!
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